Overview

A bold challenge to a central assumption in modern moral and legal thinking, showing that wrongs and rights are not flip sides of the same coin but instead represent fundamentally distinct moral phenomena. It is commonplace to regard rights and wrongs as mirror images of each other: to be wronged, we think, is to have one's rights violated. According to this familiar picture of the moral landscape, there is an inescapable relationship between our claims on others and our complaints against them. Indeed, if to have a right means just that one can reasonably claim redress for being wronged, then there is really nothing separating wrongs and rights. Legal scholar and philosopher Nicolas Cornell rejects this view. He argues that although wrongs and rights often correspond and overlap, they diverge systematically in a range of contexts and play substantively different roles in our lives. Wrongs are not merely the outline left where rights have been taken away, and rights are more than just the glimmer of future liability. To make its case, Wrongs and Rights Come Apart engages a variety of examples from literature, legal cases, moral philosophy, and contemporary culture. In accessible, lively prose, Cornell explores topics such as illicit promises, forgiveness, animal rights, and economic exploitation. It turns out that potential wrongs-unlike rights-do not determine how we ought to conduct ourselves. And crucially, rights-unlike wrongs-do not tell us what corrective action is appropriate after a violation. Only by seeing rights and wrongs as distinct concepts, Cornell concludes, can we do justice to the richness of our interpersonal obligations.

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9780674244979

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This is an excellent book. Nicolas Cornell marshals an impressive array of interesting examples from law, literature, and life to put pressure on widely shared assumptions about the connections between moral wrongs and moral rights. Wrongs and Rights Come Apart is beautifully written, and its arguments are challenging and important. Highly recommended. -- R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley Wrongs and Rights Come Apart is a rigorous work of analytic philosophy, a nuanced phenomenology of everyday moral life, and a good read to boot. Its refreshingly contrarian core claim—that wrongs, complaints, and remedies, on the one hand, and rights, demands, and claims, on the other, form distinct domains of relational morality—is made with impressive force and care. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary debates in moral (and legal) philosophy concerning the nature of rights and duties and their connection to concepts such as accountability and standing. -- John C. P. Goldberg, Harvard Law School Nicolas Cornell has given us a beautifully written, strikingly original, and compelling account of how interpersonal morality accommodates both moral agency and moral community. Wrongs and Rights Come Apartbreaks through a longstanding debate in legal, political, and moral philosophy about the nature of rights and their relationship to wrongs. Both for its vision of moral life and for its careful articulation of the concepts that structure our relations to others, this will be indispensable reading for scholars working in legal and moral philosophy. -- Larissa Katz, University of Toronto In this imaginative and elegantly written book, Nicolas Cornell deploys legal cases, well-chosen literary examples, and philosophers’ thought experiments to make the novel point that a wronging is not just the mirror image of a rights violation. Cornell’s pioneering work promises to reconfigure debates on a series of much-discussed issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy. -- David Owens, King’s College London

Author Information

Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He works on issues in normative ethics and private law theory.

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